BlueLotus wrote:Maybe the sutta are not completely rights as devarupan said.

It's not that the suttas aren't right. All the suttas are "right" and "true." It's just that they aren't always meant to be taken literally.

Take the Buddha's birth, for example. In a few suttas, it says that he walked immediately after birth and that lotus flowers grew up underneath each footstep. Do you think that really happened? Probably not, but that doesn't mean that the sutta is lying, trying to convince you that it actually happened. No, it's far more about using metaphor and myth to show us how pure and beautiful the Blessed One was. The question isn't "Did Mara really appear as a real demon to these people?" The question is "How did these people deal with the temptation?" That's what is important, not the truth value of a certain demon.

Does that make sense? The suttas aren't lying to you, they're just not interested in being a science textbook.

Gain and loss, status and disgrace, censure and praise, pleasure and pain:these conditions among human beings are inconstant,impermanent, subject to change.

my preferred option was not there for me to vote on: "I think Mara is both metaphorical AND, sometimes, a literal being as described in some suttas".

Then the Blessed One, picking up a tiny bit of dust with the tip of his fingernail, said to the monk, "There isn't even this much form...feeling...perception...fabrications...consciousness that is constant, lasting, eternal, not subject to change, that will stay just as it is as long as eternity." (SN 22.97)